


ShapeShifter

by BeneficialAddiction



Series: Boxers, Briefs, and Other Shorts [6]
Category: Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Shapeshifters, BAMF Clint, Background Violence, Shapeshifting, blood and gore in passing, shifter Clint
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-23
Updated: 2017-04-23
Packaged: 2018-10-22 02:44:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,049
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10688172
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BeneficialAddiction/pseuds/BeneficialAddiction
Summary: Shapeshifters are actually pretty common. Clint Barton is exceptional.





	ShapeShifter

Phil Coulson has been with SHIELD since it's infancy, recruited straight out of the Army Rangers by his Commanding Officer Nicholas R. Fury. He's helped to build it from the bare bones of an idea to the organization it is today, has led tactical teams all over the world as a Senior Agent in Charge. He's fought men and monsters, battled aliens both foreign and domestic, and seen things he'd never thought he'd see.

Personally he doesn't find the existence of shapeshifters all that shocking. 

Perhaps that makes him a bit of a cynical bastard, perhaps that makes him jaded, but the first time an agent drags a screeching, bucking billy goat through the halls of SHIELD by the horns and throws it into a holding cell, only to have it melt into the shape of a man several hours later, Phil is less than what you would call surprised. 

Shapeshifters are just one more strange and beautiful part of the messed-up world they all live in; he accepts them for what they are and that's that. 

Unfortunately, not everyone is as open-minded as he, not even within the enlightened realms of SHIELD. 

There are those in the world who believe that shifters, men and women who can change their shape to that of another species, are no more than their lesser selves. That they are, essentially, inhuman, and therefore to be viewed and treated as lesser forms of life. It's a disgusting attitude, one that Phil finds personally repulsive, and one that is not at all acceptable in a contracted Agent of SHIELD. 

Doesn't mean it doesn't still exist. 

Phil works with agents too fearful for their own safety to lend SHIELD the use of their animal forms, which is of course their right. He knows agents who repress their shifts for so long their trolley completely jumps the track. He's been handed the files of agents who've hidden their status so well he's stunned to read that they can shift, him being one of the best agents the intelligence organization has. 

It shouldn't be such a shock then when, in the middle of a live op, one Clinton Francis Barton previously considered human strips off his tac vest, drops his pants, and shifts right before Phil's eyes. 

See, the thing with shapeshifters is that they generally work on the same level of physics as humans do. Everything requires energy, and nothing is spontaneously created. Mass remains proportionate, personalities carry, and no characteristic disappears. Phil has seen a wide-variety of shifters in his time, but in general they tend to be small or mid-sized creatures, mostly warm-blooded and very often skittish in their animal forms. Cats and dogs, badgers and raccoons, goats and fallow deer and foxes, hell, Phil even knew a canary-yellow goldfinch. 

Clint? 

Clint Barton in his animal form is quite possibly the most magnificent thing Phil Coulson has ever seen. 

The blonde drops to all fours as silently as a cat; an enormous, golden, leonine cat. At the crest of his back he measures as high as Phil's lowest rib, his shoulders massive and round, his body strapped with huge, bulging muscle that shifts like water beneath silky, tawny fur. His head is huge, his paws heavy and as big across as dinner plates, his mane thick and full of color; wheat and honey and amber and he's beautiful, all tension and coiled power. 

Their captors don't stand a chance. 

Barton's roar rattles the door in it's frame and brings their abductors running, shocked by the fact that they've somehow found themselves with a lion on their property. They're smart enough to come guns drawn but stupid enough to open the door, and Barton springs as soon as the gap is wide enough, razor sharp claws extended and gleaming eye-teeth bared. The screams are horrific, the blood plentiful, and the carnage a gory mess far flashier than the sniper's typical work. 

Phil is uncomfortably impressed by it all and lies back on the concrete floor, the stone cool against his swollen cheek. He'd been held for at least three hours before Barton had been thrown into the cell with him, must look quite the picture if the gutted expression on the archer's face just before he'd shifted were anything to go by. He can only imagine the state of his face – it feels twice the size it should and his left eye is very nearly swollen shut. 

Really it's just not fair. 

Why it had to be Barton, why it had to be _this_ op... 

Phil sighs, lets his head loll against the floor. 

Barton's been a part of SHIELD for almost two years now, the famous Hawkeye a pretty little notch in his friend Jasper Sitwell's recruitment belt. He won't say he's head over heels for the sniper but it's a damn near thing. He ticks a lot of Coulson's boxes; young, strong, pretty, with a smart mouth and the balls to match. Competency is a thing that Phil appreciates, something that he values in himself and others, and Barton is absolutely the best in his chosen discipline. Phil may not be going out of his way to show off, to court the man in any way, but that doesn't mean he wanted to be caught out like this – stripped to his boxers, tied to a chair, bound and gagged and tipped over sideways onto the floor like an afterthought. 

All in all, not his most shining moment. 

Then Barton gets tossed into the cell, takes one looks at him, and goes absolutely primitive. 

What the actual fuck? 

Phil doesn't realize how hard he's scowling until a velvet paw touches his face, light as a feather, claws sheathed carefully, patting his cheek like any curious pussy cat. Groaning with frustration, he turns his head away, horrified by the state Barton's found him in and praying to god the embarrassed flush he feels creeping down over his chest isn't as obvious to the shapeshifter as it is to him. 

The next thing he knows a rough, slobbery tongue is slurping its way over his shoulder, across his collarbone and up the side of his throat. Phil yelps, rolls and tries to twist away, opens his eyes to glare at the lion staring down at him with a strangely human expression of worry on its face. The cat makes an inquiring little _rrrp,_ a purr if Phil's ever heard one, and suddenly a lot of Barton's sounds and mannerisms make a lot more sense than they have before. 

Phil's pretty sure he's caught the man purring before. 

"I'm fine," he grumbles, still embarrassed and more than a little cranky about it as he tries to get his feet free of the legs of the chair. "I don't suppose you could shift back, lend me a pair of _hands..."_

The lion – shit, _Barton_ – looks back at the door, tilts his head and shifts anxiously on his front paws, tail switching behind him and Phil sighs. He gets it, he does; shifting takes energy, a lot of energy, and a shifter of Barton's size is going to use up even more. For him to shift back to human now would likely deplete the last of his reserves, and then he'd be of no use to anyone. 

"Nevermind," Phil huffs, shaking his head. It was a stupid suggestion anyway. "Can you just..." 

Turns out Barton absolutely can. Lifting a heavy foreleg, quite careful of Phil's right ankle (the good one, which _hadn't_ been broken by his new friends but which suddenly seems the much more delicate of the two next to the lion's paw) he snaps the leg of Phil's chair as easily as Phil might snap a toothpick, and if that doesn't send a shiver down a man's spine he doesn't know what will. 

From there it's easy enough – though a bit painful – to shake his legs free, to tug himself loose from the pile of kindling and unravel the loops of hemp fixing his wrists and forearms behind his back. Phil gasps when he tries to stand, his leg threatening to buckle beneath his weight when the bones of his ankle grate against each other but Barton is right beside him, slipping in beneath his arm and nudging Phil gently when he tries to pull away. He's pretty sure the lion actually rolls its eyes at him, so apparently the no-touchy rules that go for all other shifters don't apply here. 

He'll never admit how grateful he is in that moment for the crutch. Throwing his arm over Barton's huge shoulders, he lets his weight sag against the lion's side, practically rides him out of the cell. As they pick their way delicately through the streaks of blood and entrails in the doorway, Phil pauses in the antechamber with the intention of collecting a weapon or two, but really in the face of all that it seems a bit unnecessary. 

He's got a lion for fuck's sake; what does he need a pistol for? 

Eh... 

Might have a bit of a concussion too. 

Barton is making grumbly little noises as he waits impatiently for Phil to finish his dilly-dallying, lifting his front paws one at a time to flick them prissily. He's stepped into a puddle of something red and sticky Phil would really rather not contemplate, and he's got the most snooty, persnickety look on his face that Phil has ever seen. It actually gets him to bark a laugh, startling the lion into lifting its eyebrow at him, into flicking its mane and turning its nose up snootily. 

"Alright, alright, let's go," Phil groans, hobbling back over to its side. "No need to mock. Our friends here rattled my brain-pan; what's your excuse?" 

The lion rumbles, its ears swiveling atop its head as it listens to something deeper inside the base, and Phil gets the distinct feeling that they've definitely outstayed their welcome. He's just gotten his arm back over Barton's shoulders when something catches his eye, drags him away from his side one more time. The lion makes an irritable chuffing sound, shows his teeth, but Phil's caught sight of the one weapon he can't bring himself to leave behind, and it's with reverent hands that he lifts Hawkeye's bow and quiver from the hook on the wall. 

Sliding it carefully over his shoulder, he settles the weight between his shoulder blades and tries for casual as he turns back to the big cat, it's green and gold eyes narrowed and locked in on him like he's prey. 

"Sorry," he says, because he knows the archer doesn't allow anyone to touch his gear. "But it's not fair for you to lose it because of me." 

He's careful in his approach this time, unsure of his welcome now that he's broken this cardinal law of staying on Clint Barton's good side, but the lion just waits for him to settle against his side before turning his huge head, rasping his tongue over the point of Phil's elbow. It feels remarkably like a thank-you, and really Phil's just going to take what he can get at this point. 

It's a surreal experience, walking out of that bunker at the shapeshifter's side only to be met by the incoming retrieval team. Every agent in the group goes slack-jawed and silent as Barton calmly walks Phil past them and up the gangplank into the belly of the quinjet, and he's pretty sure that Agent Marco Tandy, one of SHIELD's more outspoken anti-shifters, actually shits his pants when Barton lies down at Phil's feet and serenely begins licking the blood from his claws. He has to scold the lion away when medical comes at him with a penlight, swatting him with a fluttering stack of after-action reports when he lifts his lip in a fanged grimace, but loopy as he is with the concussion and the pain meds they start him on he appreciates the show of protective instinct. 

He doesn’t know what it means. 

Doesn't know where it's going. 

But he suspects that the story of how Phil Coulson came riding a lion out of a Hydra bunker with Hawkeye's bow strapped to his back is one he'll never live down, not for the rest of his life.


End file.
